Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Okay, so that's not actually the title of the film and I'm taking a dig. What else is new? In truth, I'll be the last person to ever bitch about a "rock"umentary being made on pretty much any band (except Nickelback, of course). I'd much rather watch a movie about Quiet Riot than the millionth remake of some movie that bombed 20 years ago.

While I enjoyed the Anvil movie, this film has a lot more going for it in the "potential" department. I'm a total geek about this type of stuff but I think it's say to say that even most casual rock fan knows of Quiet Riot. Credited with starting the Sunset Strip/hairband explosion of the 1980's, Quiet Riot scored the first #1 album for a heavy metal band with 1983's Metal Health. This caused record execs to zero in on Hollywood and spawned hundreds of bands with hooks, looks, and enough hairspray to make Al Gore create a crappy movie years later.

This movie seems to be culled from personal home videos of drummer Frankie Banali. Through the magic of torrents, I recently watched the VH1 Behind the Music episode on Quiet Riot that aired many years ago. Their story is intriguing and, whether you liked the band or not, there's plenty of history, drama, and unintentional comedy that has surrounded this band over the years. The VH1 episode was completed well before the death of singer Kevin DuBrow. While Kevin made no excuses for his past behavior and big mouth on that BTM episode, the remainder of his life seems to be a mystery except to those within his inner-circle. It should be interesting to see what he was going through at the end.

The only complaints that I have so far (and you knew I would have some) are as follows. The title of the film is 'Now You're Here, There's No Way Back'. This may have been something that DuBrow uttered on a regular basis leading into one of their shows, but for a movie title, it sucks. Something generic like Bang Your Head: The Quiet Riot story would work better. As Sebastian Bach would say, "It rolls off the tongue." But I digress.

My other complaint is the availability of the trailer as well as the trailer's content. While I suppose this is just a teaser trailer for a film that will be appropriately hyped next year, I gotta ask, why bother hyping it at all if you are only allowing it to be viewed through the Noisecreep site? While I think Noisecreep is a fine site, in this age of instant gratification, you're not going to get many folks wanting to click through on this link to view this trailer that features mostly crowd shots from an arena show in 1983 while DuBrow tries to hype them up with his alligator mouth. I guarantee that a number of you reading this post will not bother clicking through since I can't just feature the video here on my site to help promote the movie. Oh well, maybe there will be more promo for this film the future. Until then, you'll have to feel the noize instead of seeing it.